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The Left Loses the Judiciary

The golden age of conservative jurisprudence is here.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism.

Fisher v. University of Texas protected racial discrimination in college admissions.

Justice Kennedy wrote the decision joined by Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Breyer. The court’s only African-American justice dissented. As did Roberts and Alito. Scalia had been the most vigorous of the Supreme Court members in challenging racial preferences in college admissions. But he had passed away.

The 4-3 decision that continued the shameful tradition of progressive racist jurisprudence will become an impossible relic once President Trump’s next Supreme Court nominee joins Gorsuch on the bench.

As we wrap up a season of Supreme Court decisions successfully reaffirming constitutional law, if at times only narrowly, it’s time to look forward to the coming restoration of our founding document.

And the restoration of our freedoms, our dignity and our honor.

The early years of the Trump administration have seen both the worst and the best of the judiciary. Federal judges joined the leftist resistance by seizing the power to decide everything from immigration policy down to whom the President of the United States can block on Twitter. These decisions weren’t just power grabs, they ignored basic law and precedent, and not to mention checks and balances.

The President spent months having his legitimate authority of office crippled while waiting for the Supreme Court to intervene. And sometimes these interventions, as in Trump v. Hawaii, were shockingly narrow. Without Gorsuch, the 5-4 decision, in which the court’s four leftists insisted on denying Trump the authority of his office, would have been the verdict of the Supreme Court and the law of the land.

During the election, Never Trumpers told us that a Republican Senate could check Hillary Clinton. Now, George Will and other GOP defectors insist that the Senate needs to be turned over to the Democrats.

Imagine the Supreme Court with two or three more leftists on it. That would have been the outcome.

Then ask how anyone who believes those cases involving religious freedom, freedom of speech, and the rights of states should have been decided to the left could possibly claim to be a conservative.

If President Trump had done nothing else, two Supreme Court appointments alone are transformative.

We stand on the threshold of a golden age in conservative jurisprudence. After generations of wandering through a wasteland of judicial activism and unilateral supremacism, we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. And so can the left. That is why it is preparing to go to war for Kennedy’s seat.

Most elections only last for years. But Supreme Court appointments resonate across the ages.

Justice Kennedy took office in 1988. George H. W. Bush gave the nation the gift of Clarence Thomas in 1991. Bill Clinton sent Ruth Bader Ginsburg on in 1993 and Breyer in 1994. Think about how much these men and women altered the country across the decades. And how much more their successors will.

The left has begun screaming about Roe v. Wade. It doesn’t really believe that the Supreme Court will do away with it. But it has no better way to mobilize a screaming mob and all the money it can grab. Every major media outlet is already assembling hit pieces on the likely candidates. Democrat Senators are preparing to accuse anyone whom Trump nominates of being a rapist and a murderer of women.

Sight unseen.

It’s not really about Roe v. Wade, though that will likely be the social issue that the left will rally around. It’s not even about Trump v. Hawaii. It is about Janus v. AFSCME and Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute because it’s about defending the corrupt power and privilege of the left.

Democrats have abused the courts to protect their own corrupt institutions, whether it’s municipal unions or college campuses, and to suppress political dissent, Masterpiece Cakeshop and National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra, are typical examples of this phenomenon.

Losing the Supreme Court will roll back the judicial activism of generations. It will make it harder for the left to rig elections, Abbott v. Perez, and protect the ability of states to fight voter fraud, Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute. It will go on protecting religious freedom and it will start fighting racism.

And it will stop the judicial activist assault on the Trump administration. Because it’s not just about the Supreme Court.

The nine seats of the Court are the biggest judicial prizes. But President Trump and the Senate have been breaking judicial appointment records. 21 federal appeals judges have been confirmed. The 87 nominees are a down payment on an opportunity to name a quarter of the Federal judiciary.

And these aren’t just the same old crowd. The new judicial nominations represent a culture shift.

The Supreme Court still consists of Yale and Harvard graduates. But a shift is underway in the lower ranks with University of Virginia Law and Duke rising, while Harvard and Yale falter. Trump’s early batch of judicial nominees included an Indian-American judge out of UC Berkeley School of Law, a former magistrate judge with a degree from the University of North Dakota and a University of Nebraska College of Law grad.

When the left complains that Trump’s judicial picks lack diversity, it’s because they don’t fill quotas, instead they have intellectual diversity.

As Above the Law put it, "As Trump and McConnell take over the federal judiciary, it’s interesting to me that more people from Chicago and UVA and Duke are getting clerkships, while fewer people from Harvard and Yale are. It could be a one-year blip… it could be a 25-year blip if the Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation continue to have their way."

If you want to understand the left’s clamor that Trump’s nominees are unqualified, it’s not because they’re unqualified. It’s because they’re coming from outside the usual lily pads in the great swamp.

These aren’t just cosmetic changes.

Everyone knew in 2016 that by 2020, the winner would have significantly transformed the judiciary. If Trump can get a second term and if the Republicans can maintain a Senate majority, then everything will change. Whatever else happens, those changes will be huge. And they will be very difficult to undo.

Everything won’t change overnight. But it will change for generations to come.

Like an iceberg, most of the problems with the Federal government can only be seen underwater. But the changes are also only visible underwater. The State Department has been fundamentally transformed. The military is slowly starting to return to what it was before the Obama era. The bloody battle for control of the EPA is largely reflected in the media’s obsessive attacks on its head. And conservatives are recreating the left’s efforts with a successful long march through the judiciary.

That is another reason why leftist judges have been furiously lashing out at Trump. They know that the tide is turning. As Obama liked to say, their leftist ideology is no longer on the right side of history.

Ever since the election, the left retreated into a hateful media bubble. It built an echo chamber in which everyone was convinced that President Trump would fail. It even managed to find some Republicans who were happy to climb into the bubble with them. But the only people who need to live in a bubble are incapable of coping with the reality outside. And reality has a notorious right-wing bias.